Planning for such outages is nontrivial. As the scale of data and network connectivity increases, models for post-failure recovery processing are difficult to model. That said, public perception that the airlines should be doing better to mitigate these outages is understandable. Second-guessing has already begun. Was it a lapse in cybersecurity? Massive outsourcing? Loss of talent? Cost-cutting?

It may have been a failure to properly model British Airways systems and the processes required to recover from a hardware outage.